Apple unveils Swift, a brand new Xcode programming language for developers

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  • Reply 81 of 214
    hcrefugeehcrefugee Posts: 98member

    I heard a fusillade of analysts' heads exploding when the keynote ended without announcement of new hardware.  

     

    Apple focused on software development at a developer's conference. The horror!  And put analyst's nonsensical hardware predictions/expectations where they belong.

  • Reply 82 of 214
    thepixeldocthepixeldoc Posts: 2,257member
    PREDICTION:

    <h1 style="margin-bottom:15px;margin-top:0px;">Samsung unveils Swipe, a brand new programming language that resembles Swift</h1>

    You certainly meant to write:

    S-Wipe

    :D

    Edit: pipped by RedFox... dang nag it!:rolleyes:
  • Reply 83 of 214
    hametahameta Posts: 79member
    You keep forgetting that everyone on Wall Street is waiting for an iWatch that will sell in the tens of millions of units at $300 a pop.  Did you see any iWatch?  No.  Did you see any new AppleTV?  No.  So it makes sense that investors quickly sold off their shares because they can't make any money from Apple this week.  Wall Street wanted to see hardware, not software at the developers conference.  Software simply doesn't make investors salivate when it comes to Apple.


    What Kind of Investors Are You Talkin' About ?

    Short-Sellers ? That's NOT TRUE LONG-TERM INVESTORS at All !!! They're NOTHING BUT " Atrocious SPECULATORS " !

    I'm A LONG-TERM AAPL INVESTOR and WELCOMED Very Much Today's Announcement !

    What You're Saying is " SHAMELESS COVER-UP & JUSTIFICATION " of VILLAIN's MANIPULATION of AAPL !!!!!!
  • Reply 84 of 214
    asdasdasdasd Posts: 5,686member
    rogifan wrote: »
    On a recent issue of. MacBreak Weekly Rene Ritchie said that Craig Federighi is more of an engineering nerd whereas Scott Forstall was more interested in UI design. I think it was a brilliant decision by Cook to give software design to Ive. This allows Federighi to focus more on the engineering side and let Ive and the software designers focus on the UI design. I liked what I saw from Yosemite. It brings the Mac and iOS closer together but it wasn't just slapping an iOS 7 coat of paint on OSX. What we saw this WWDC to me is as big and as important as the introduction of the App Store. 4,000 new API's. That blows my mind.

    Forstall was technical. He wrote code in NEXT. In fact he wrote something which became the basis of UITableview which is the workhorse of iOS navigation.

    danox wrote: »
    Despite what some many people have said, at some point in the near future Apple will move away Intel cpu's, most of the young programers and small to medium sized companies will jump into Swift with both feet, hitting the ground running, in short if you don't use Apple programing tools you could find yourself on the outside looking in. After more than 20 years with Obj-C, Swift isn't here for nothing. All the software just keeps moving forward at Apple and within the OS X and iOS ecosystems in a very positive way. 

    This has nothing to do with the hardware. Nothing.

    It's an interesting language and actually resembles C# rather than JavaScript.

    Some of the excitement about type inference is overblown. Generics is interesting. Triples are interesting. And I am 10% through the book.
  • Reply 85 of 214
    jasenj1jasenj1 Posts: 923member

    Swift for the JVM coming in 3... 2... 1...

     

    From my quick reading of the reference book, several things remind me of Groovy: no semi-colons, the "?." operator, implicit typing, closures. It's a bit odd to me that the type is after the identifier.

     

    The playground will be a big separator. An integrated, GUI leveraging, instant feedback system; that will be very cool.

     

    I haven't paid attention to what Microsoft has been doing with their developer tools so I can't comment on how the new XCode compares.

  • Reply 86 of 214
    asdasdasdasd Posts: 5,686member
    hameta wrote: »
    What Kind of Investors Are You Talkin' About ?

    Short-Sellers ? That's NOT TRUE LONG-TERM INVESTORS at All !!! They're NOTHING BUT " Atrocious SPECULATORS " !

    I'm A LONG-TERM AAPL INVESTOR and WELCOMED Very Much Today's Announcement !

    What You're Saying is " SHAMELESS COVER-UP & JUSTIFICATION " of VILLAIN's MANIPULATION of AAPL !!!!!!

    I am glad you capitalised and colorised that or I wouldn't have taken it seriously.
  • Reply 87 of 214
    asdasdasdasd Posts: 5,686member
    jasenj1 wrote: »
    Swift for the JVM coming in 3... 2... 1...

    From my quick reading of the reference book, several things remind me of Groovy: no semi-colons, the "?." operator, implicit typing, closures. It's a bit odd to me that the type is after the identifier.

    The playground will be a big separator. An integrated, GUI leveraging, instant feedback system; that will be very cool.

    I haven't paid attention to what Microsoft has been doing with their developer tools so I can't comment on how the new XCode compares.

    Type after identifier is not the way I read. Yeah the playground is really going to promote it. I have new UI features for my application ( a Mac app) and I would use this if it integrates with the rest of the code. Although it may not be run time compatible with OS 9.

    We need to get a move on because recruiters are looking for 5 years experience already.
  • Reply 88 of 214
    lukefrenchlukefrench Posts: 102member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by ecs View Post



    I learnt a long time ago that it's always a bad idea to use custom non-standard APIs or languages, unless you encapsulate all the nonportable stuff into insulated code. In other words, I won't use swift nor metal, unless I really need it for some feature, and it such case I'll encapsulate it in a clearly isolated module which doesn't affect the C/C++/OpenGL/OpenCL code.



    It's a bad direction IMHO. They're copying Google by moving to nonstandard tech. When the Mac Pro was announced last year, they said "you know you should be using OpenCL". That's the right direction, helping establish an standard like OpenCL by doing machines which shine in OpenCL.



    The move from OpenGL to metal is the opposite of that. They shouldn't blame OpenGL has overhead, but develop the fastest and best OpenGL implementation in the planet.



    They're abandoning the right direction they had these last years.

     

    Swift come in complement/replacement of Objective-C which Apple was already the only one to use and drive the Cocoa Apis which are also an Os X exclusive, so no change here. And it seems to be both fast and highly innovative (real closures, not the current blocks hack, in a C like language ? multi types returns ? heavens)

     

    Metal is another problem, but the reality is that OpenGL, despite being a standard, is old, and unsalvageable due to out of date architecture. Worse, it is ill suited for a dynamic language like obj-C or Swift. Microsoft has a better private API and linux has nothing different that really works. So the only choice was to do something new. I dont know if the arch is good, but from the perfs that were announced, it must be done at least partly right.

     

    the only still alive alternative would have been Mantle, which is AMD specific.

     

    More, most developpers will use an intermediate rendering and physic engine to compensate the woes of OpenGL, and metal seems to incorporate a lot of that too. 

     

    Now the only question is that is seems to leverage the A7 proc, which means that Os X keep using OpenGL ?

  • Reply 89 of 214
    g4dualieg4dualie Posts: 21member

    @ghostface147 

     

    Hook up with a budding developer and design things together!

  • Reply 90 of 214

    Besides the new Swift programming language, I was really impressed with "CloudKit"!  It is Apple's answer to Amazon's DynamoDB  and Google's AppEngine, and it is FREE!  

  • Reply 91 of 214
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,309moderator
    anyone seen any syntax for this yet?

    They have examples here:

    https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/referencelibrary/GettingStarted/LandingPage/index.html

    You can click through a bunch of pages there.

    No semicolons at the end of lines but that doesn't mean tabs for scope like python as they still use braces. I guess they'll use newlines for end of line markers. This is harder in cross-platform languages due to the variety in line endings but fine for OS X.

    It looks clean and real-time feedback is great and how development should have always been. If they can do it without resetting the app, that would be even better. SDKs like Epic's Unreal allows developers to maintain an active app state while they change things.

    I was hoping they'd actually just buy Unreal SDK or Unity but it looks like they don't want to pick just one as they noted a few SDK developers during the presentation. Hopefully Metal will allow developers to bring over fuller apps too. The graphics demo looked very nice and that's before the new hardware is out.
  • Reply 92 of 214
    eckerguseckergus Posts: 96member
    paxman wrote: »
    Yup - this was definitely underwhelming. No new 6" iPhone.

    /s
    Product announcements are always in the fall, not during WWDC... but you wouldn't know that since you obviously know nothing about Apple.

    Edit: Totally missed the sarcasm... =s
  • Reply 93 of 214
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Originally Posted by eckergus View Post

    Product announcements are always in the fall, not during WWDC... but you wouldn't know that since you obviously know nothing about Apple.



    Sarcasm is denoted with a /s tag. And no, they’re not always in the fall. This is a modern occurrence that, frankly, is pretty silly.

  • Reply 94 of 214
    dick applebaumdick applebaum Posts: 12,527member
    I called it. I said that developer resources at Apple would have been primarily used to convert iOS to 64bit, which is why iOS 7 wasn't a huge update.


    Now that the difficult 64bit transition is done, Apple could devote resources back to iOS 8 itself. And boy did they deliver.

    this.

    Apple just layed down another 5 years of OS foundation: 64 Bit, Biometrically protected, with New faster language, New GL 'to the metal'  interface.   That's covers a new generation of developers, and as grow curves go, will take Apple to the 2 Billion iOS user range.  (if 130 Million NEW users last year is a factual number... figure that it will be 200+ million in a couple years).

    You guys are both right on!

    IMO, this is the most significant announcement(s) that Apple has ever made -- and it didn't include any hardware. *

    In both OS X and iOS Apple has set the bar for the next 10 years. All this and a new programming language with ability to do interactive programming and running of an app.

    Then there's the iCloud ... And the new apps ... And .... And ...

    I suspect within a few weeks Apple will make some separate hardware announcements to exploit these new capabilities.

    We ain't seen nothin' yet!


    * I'd bet some of those iPads had the A8 APU, with a new GPU and lots of RAM to exploit the 64-bit capability.

    Yosemite just finished downloading -- waiting for my iOS device files and xCode ... really anxious to play!
  • Reply 95 of 214
    solipsismxsolipsismx Posts: 19,566member
    I just checked Amazon and there are zero books for programming in Swift. No one is supporting it! FAIL!
  • Reply 96 of 214
    eckerguseckergus Posts: 96member

    Sarcasm is denoted with a /s tag. And no, they’re not always in the fall. This is a modern occurrence that, frankly, is pretty silly.
    Oh crap! I totally missed the sarcasm! I see it now. (shoot me). I take that back man. I'm sorry, I was lead by impulse and I shouldn't have!
  • Reply 97 of 214
    dick applebaumdick applebaum Posts: 12,527member
    duplicate
  • Reply 98 of 214
    eckerguseckergus Posts: 96member
    solipsismx wrote: »
    I just checked Amazon and there are zero books for programming in Swift. No one is supporting it! FAIL!
    Now, that is sarcasm full swing! Hehe
  • Reply 99 of 214
    dick applebaumdick applebaum Posts: 12,527member
    solipsismx wrote: »
    I just checked Amazon and there are zero books for programming in Swift. No one is supporting it! FAIL!


    http://swift-lang.org
  • Reply 100 of 214
    ecsecs Posts: 307member
    danox wrote: »
    Despite what some many people have said, at some point in the near future Apple will move away Intel cpu's, most of the young programers and small to medium sized companies will jump into Swift with both feet, hitting the ground running, in short if you don't use Apple programing tools you could find yourself on the outside looking in. After more than 20 years with Obj-C, Swift isn't here for nothing. All the software just keeps moving forward at Apple and within the OS X and iOS ecosystems in a very positive way. 
    And can you explain why you cannot use C/C++ without an Intel CPU? Most of my lines of C/C++ code have been written and used without Intel processors. All this hype about proprietary nonstandard technologies is nonsense. Do you remember AltiVec? At one point it was assumed you were a dead developer if you didn't optimize your code with AltiVec.

    And QuickDraw3D? Do you remember that too? And Carbon? And objective C? The same remains true for all proprietary tech outside of Apple. Do you remember the HP Starbase gfx lib? Or the SGI IrisGL? (precursor to OpenGL but defunct).

    Conclusion: all proprietary tech is abandoned sooner or later, once the owner company decides to take a different direction, and all developers who used it, lose a big amount of code effort invested with such proprietary stuff, unless they were wise to encapsulate all nonportable stuff in clearly isolated modules.

    Only big standards remain. Swift will be gone one day, just like Carbon was gone. Metal will be gone sooner than OpenGL. And C/C++ will survive far, far beyond.

    So, yes, I'll use the technologies announced today if they're useful, but isolated in a Apple-specific folder that doesn't affect the whole of my code.
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